Infectious disease research has the potential for broad application because everyone, in every area of the world, is infected by microbes at some point in life. Microbes are simple organisms capable of rapid genetic mutation and causing wide-spread pandemics and massive loss of life.

Emerging Infectious Diseases (EIDs) are a significant burden on global economies and public health, driven largely by socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors;  In the global human population, there has been the emergence of 350 infectious diseases between 1940 and 2014.

New study compares performance of real-time infectious disease forecasting models - the first documented comparison of several real-time infectious disease forecasting models by several teams across many seasons, in which a majority of models consistently showed higher accuracy than historical baseline models.